If you’ve ever browsed through your Devices and Services applets in Control Panel, you’ve seen a lot of entries. Some are started, and some aren’t. Some start at boot, some are automatic, and some are manual. A few are disabled. You might be wondering why.

In Windows NT, tons of devices (device drivers for hardware) and services (useful software for the operating system) are registered in the OS, whether you ever use them or not. Unlike Windows 98, it’s very hard to remove them when you need to (for example, when you change hardware and drivers) and often wiser just to put them on the disabled list. As for services, sometimes you don’t need them, and you can save system overhead by turning them off. But which drivers drive which hardware, and what do those services do?

Vague driver and service namesOne thing that interferes with troubleshooting Windows NT is the vague naming convention for many devices and services. For example, Sparrow.sys is the name of the Adaptec SCSI driver. For your reference, here are a couple of tables giving the names and purposes of the drivers that ship with Windows NT (Table 1) and the default services used by the OS (Table 2). Remember to be careful when you work with devices and services. Beware of disabling services that depend on other services, as noted below.

The driver list comes from Microsoft’s MSDN online library. The default services list is available in the NT 4.0 help files. If you ever need them locally, press Start | Help, and type default services in the index to view the topic. Happy troubleshooting!